Trepalium

Trepalium is a six-episode French dystopian miniseries created by Antarès Bassis and Sophie Hiet, broadcast on Arte in 2016. Its title blends trépas, meaning death, with tripalium, the ancient torture device at the root of the French word for work, signaling the show's central question: the place of labor in society.

Set in the near future, in a world where eighty percent of the population is unemployed, the story follows Izia, a young woman born in the Zone, the impoverished side of a wall that separates the jobless masses from the privileged twenty percent. As unrest grows among the unemployed and acts of sabotage multiply, the fragile balance between the two territories threatens to collapse. To calm the situation, the government launches a program selecting ten thousand Zone residents to work in the City.

Directed by Vincent Lannoo, the series aired in two blocks of three episodes on February 11 and 18, 2016, and was conceived as a closed-ended story with no second season. The cast includes Lubna Azabal alongside Pierre Deladonchamps, Charles Berling and Ronit Elkabetz. It was screened out of competition at the La Rochelle TV Fiction Festival in 2015.